Note 131 — ERA OF THE FREEMAN'S JOURNAL

Published in the Freeman's Journal, February 27, 1782. One week earlier it was advertised for sale as a broadside. I have followed the 1786 version.

James Rivington, an Englishman, was a bookseller and printer in New York from 1761 until the close of the Revolution. In 1773 he published the first number of The New York Gazetteer, or the Connecticut, New Jersey, Hudson's River and Quebec Weekly Advertiser. At the opening of the war he became a violent British partisan. His office was destroyed by the Whigs in 1775. Two years later he established Rivington's New York Loyal Gazette, which became the official British newspaper in America. On December 13 of the same year, he changed the name to the Royal Gazette. In the last years of the Revolution, when British success seemed more and more uncertain, Rivington began to lean toward the Whig side, but he was never trusted by the patriots, and he passed his last years in loneliness and poverty.